Novalis was born into a family of Protestant Lower Saxon nobility and took his pseudonym from “de Novali,” a name his family had formerly used. He studied law at the University of Jena (1790), where he became acquainted with Friedrich von Schiller, and then at Leipzig, where he formed a friendship with Friedrich von Schlegel and was introduced to the philosophical ideas of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He completed his studies at Wittenberg in 1793, and in 1796 he was appointed auditor to the Saxon government saltworks at Weissenfels.

In 1794 Novalis met and fell in love with 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn. They were engaged in 1795, but she died of tuberculosis two years later. Novalis expressed his grief in Hymnen an die Nacht (1800; Hymns to the Night), six prose poems interspersed with verse. In this work Novalis celebrates night, or death, as an entry into a higher life in the presence of God and anticipates a mystical and loving union with Sophie and with the universe as a whole after his own death. In 1797 he went to the Academy of Freiberg to study mining. Novalis became engaged (to Julie von Charpentier) in 1798, and a year later he became a mine inspector at the saltworks at Weissenfels. He died of tuberculosis in 1801.

Novalis’s last years were astonishingly creative, filled with encyclopaedic studies, the draft of a philosophical system based on idealism, and poetic work. Two collections of fragments that appeared during his lifetime, Blütenstaub (1798; “Pollen”) and Glauben und Liebe (1798; “Faith and Love”), indicate his attempt to unite poetry, philosophy, and science in an allegorical interpretation of the world. His mythical romance Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), set in an idealized vision of the European Middle Ages, describes the mystical and romantic searchings of a young poet. The central image of his visions, a blue flower, became a widely recognized symbol of Romantic longing among Novalis’s fellow Romantics. In the essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799; “Christendom or Europe”), Novalis calls for a universal Christian church to restore, in a new age, a Europe whose medieval cultural, social, and intellectual unity had been destroyed by the Reformation and the Enlightenment.